From her oeuvre of recent photographs one will deduce that Sue de Beer
is an active consumer of the darker products of culture. Recent photos
take as their ur-texts and influences Nightmare on Elm Street, the
Columbine High School massacre, and Dennis Cooper novels. Surveying
them quickly, one has the sense that de Beer loves soap opera, and isn't
interested in straightforward social documentary or critique. One sees
immediately that de Beer is interested in a Proustian level of detail,
the level of detail that professors and cineastes pursue, and, since
high-low distinctions aren't made by de Beer, the level of detail one
sees in the work of obsessive bedroom hobbyists, homepage makers, and
devoted fans. Also, one will note that many of these carefully
considered photos pivot around historical events or works violent or
graphic in nature. The photo's graphic violence is, understandably,
primary for some viewers, allowing them to ask questions about what
artists get away with, why something is or isn't art, or what about
decency and that whole caper. Other skepticism might focus more on the
artist's own psychology and life experience: someone asked when seeing
the slides and images I used when writing this essay, "Why is she so
into mutilation?" or "Is she really disturbed?" Certainly, de Beer's
works are unfamiliar in a contemporary art market in which images of
violence are generally undesirable. There are also perhaps the premises
that her work takes cheap, sensational shots, is cultish, or even that
this kind of work would be more acceptable if produced by a male agent.
Some of these concerns are perhaps fueled by the lack of overt emotion
in many of the photos.

First, doubters should be reminded that
de Beer's work is part of a pictorial history of the dead or violated
body as seen in the art practices of Edouard Manet, Paul McCarthy, and
Sue Coe (for starters). Besides this artistic continuum, the violence is
part of a well-considered, structured project relevant in our American
culture in which we are all asked to process profanities like the
Columbine High School killings, Jon Benet Ramsay's exploitation and
death, teens throwing babies in dumpsters (again, just for starters).
De Beer embraces these events without shame, and explores them in depth.
She has an interest in the evolution and production of violence,
researching everything from set construction on films like Nightmare on
Elm Street, to the particular family histories of school shooters, to
the various landscapes of each game level in Quake. Simply, she is a
kind of a fan or hobbyist, a close reader of what is not traditionally
allowed in mainstream culture.

Her compositions tend to be
highly structured, even diagrammed, but spare and lacking surface level
passion. The ennui of the latest body of photographs is as deliberate as
other formal aspects of their pictorial fluency. Quiet on the surface,
the photos allow various contradictions and challenges built in to the
experience of consuming horror to move into the foreground. For example,
in Bed, based on a slasher
film, blood dripping from a ceiling is one quiet part of a ėsomething
wrong' architectural scene: the photo posits a number of spatial
contradictions while a body falls apart. Or the photo of the artist
giving birth to herself in a bloody mess (Untitled) inspired by a scene from Dennis
Cooper's Frisk asks questions about bodily limits, fusion, and logic.
Here, physicality, volume, the shape and line of the arms, the
marble-white skin, these elements register while the overall affect is
fairly flat. Consequently, the challenge of one adult giving birth to
another seems corporeal rather than horrific, and the experience of
looking at Untitled is troubling. In more character driven works
like Sasha, a shot of an
extra from a horror film, one almost forgets about the splayed abdomen
on display in light of the sitter's ennui and
Sargentesque*** diffidence. Though fictional, Sasha
and the film she could have been in, the film's sets, codes, lighting,
etc, these have their own virtues, possibilities and protocols that
interest de Beer.

De Beer's unusual but rich microcosm for
examining formal concerns and cultural phenomena puts her in the
vulnerable position of having her work read as being morally dubious and
suspect. Like with Gerhard Richter's Baader-Meinhof series, this
vulnerability is one of the works' greatest sources of depth. There is
more to them than cultish shock shlock: first, most of the time,
historical events in general, or Columbine and other school shootings
more specifically, tend to remain unfinished business for most of us. De
Beer's work challenges their reification and let's us work through these
events again. Second, one cannot help but enjoy her libertine approach
and pictorial fluency. Third, her work doesn't feel formally or
intellectually superficial (in fact, her self-portraits are epic):
instead it's compelling.

* Twelve students and a teacher were killed on April 20,
1999, at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado, by students Dylan
Klebold and Eric Harris. The two ended the rampage by killing
themselves. This was the worst high school shooting in US
history.

** Jon Benet Ramsay was found bludgeoned
to death in her parents' home in Boulder, Colorado in 1996. Jon Benet
was a frequent contributor in child pageants, winning ėLittle Miss
Colorado' the year before her death at age six.

***
One of the great painters of the late 19th and early 20th centuries,
John Singer Sargent (1856-1925) made his fortune and reputation as a
portrait painter of the beautiful and influential. President Woodrow
Wilson, oil tycoon John D. Rockefeller, novelist Henry James, and art
patron Isabella Stewart Gardner all sat for him.